


carrion to the crow

by jkerblood



Series: dark persona give me coping fics [1]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Angst, Attempted, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Blood and Gore, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dubious Morality, Gen, Horror, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Incest, Insanity, Minor Character Death, Murder, No Romance, Pre-Canon, Psychological Trauma, Suicidal Thoughts, Underage Drinking, Underage Rape/Non-con, but he is underage, yeah he definitely got ptsd from this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:01:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23392168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jkerblood/pseuds/jkerblood
Summary: Loki was never his first persona.
Relationships: Akechi Goro & Loki
Series: dark persona give me coping fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1701901
Comments: 6
Kudos: 31





	carrion to the crow

**Author's Note:**

> (akechi is like 16 in this)  
> tags for tw

“Why don’t you escort our friend back to his hotel,” Shido says. The question isn’t really a question at all, and Goro’s stomach drops. 

His head is aching and he hasn’t had a drink of anything non-alcoholic all afternoon, but this wasn’t how he wanted to leave. He’s not an idiot. He knows his hair is too long and his face is too effeminate to ward off old creeps. There’s no possible way he can say no, either, and he _hates_ the power they have over him. The men with Shido are older, predatory, and absolutely none of them are on his side. That, and the puerile feeling of not wanting to displease his father still exists, no matter how hard he tries to crush it. 

The ‘friend’ in question is one of the worse ones, always with a young-looking host at his side and a daughter he talks too much about. He grins at Goro in the dim of the club, white teeth bared and daring him to object. He barely knows the man’s name, has barely seen his face, but it doesn’t matter. He tells Goro to call him sir. He calls the man bastard.

In his mind, at least.

He brings Goro to some trashy out-of-the-way hotel still in Shinjuku that immediately sets him on edge. What if someone _notices_ him there, for God’s sake? 

(Seeing pictures of himself on Twitter taken by fans is still unsettling. It keeps him on guard whenever he goes out in public.)

He gives a once over of the lobby, discreetly checking for cameras. To his luck, there are none, but the clerk gives him a critical stare and he glances away, self-conscious. _Was he really going to do this? Sleep with a man he barely knew, for Shido?_

Before Goro even has time to question his resolve, he’s corralled to one of the rooms. The grip on his arm makes him want to recoil, but he keeps it under control and focuses on minimizing contact.

Goro steps into the room as the door is shut and locked behind him. There’s two king mattresses side by side, and he hopes they’ll end up in two different beds, but it’s unlikely. He breathes out a disappointed sigh, knowing that he’s going to be stuck there for the rest of the night. Damn.

“Something wrong, sweetheart?” The man asks, and Goro shoves back a shudder. Disgusting. He calls his daughter that, too.

“Of course not,” he responds cordially, taking a seat at the bed opposite him. The man refuses to take the hint and moves to sit next to him, so Goro presses himself to the headboard to try to escape. 

It doesn’t work.

The bastard asks him to pour the wine on the nightstand, twirling a strand of Goro’s hair between his fingers. Goro obliges—if only to escape the touch—grasping cold glass with shaky hands and cursing himself for showing weakness once he spills it over the rim. He laughs it off, wiping away the spot as quickly as he can, but the bastard has already sensed blood in the water. The older man moves to wrap his hand around Goro’s, sending a liquid shot of primal terror through his body. 

_He doesn’t want this._

He freezes, pinned to his place like a cornered rabbit. The bastard takes it as confirmation to move, running his other hand over Goro’s thigh. This should be nothing.

_He doesn’t want this._

His breath catches in his throat, sticking painfully. It’s getting harder to breathe; the bastard draws his tongue over the column of Goro’s neck, forcing out a disgusted shiver. Why is he so afraid?

_He doesn’t want this._

Goro thinks about Robin.

He would take it gracefully, virtuous and pure and somehow untouched. It would never be his fault. He would never get revenge, never _need_ to repent after. Bruises would heal, never again showing up like trails of rot—consuming, damaging him. Shouldn’t he be the one in control?

_He doesn’t want this hedoesn’twantthis hedoesn’twantthishedoesn’t—_

Something shrinks and snaps in him—twists his hands into the bastard’s hair in a facsimile of reciprocation. The air turns icy against his skin, numbing him down until all that’s left is a single determination to stop it. His fingers wind tighter and tighter until the man shouts out in pain, and at that moment, Goro can only savor it. 

“Get off.” He’s tired of trying to play nice. He’s tired of it all. He wants freedom and power and he will rip it out of himself.

The bastard smiles. No, he says, and it’s the last word that comes from his mouth.

Goro remembers it in pieces, afterward, like the thousands and thousands of distorted shards glaring from the floor. The wine stains his digits red, then comes blood, so much tackier. It seeps into his fingerprints, stamping over like a perpetrator about to be cataloged. The bottle shatters like sugar glass and the bird bone hollow-neck digs into his palm.

He should stop, he thinks. _Can he?_ Goro doesn’t know anymore. It feels too good, like cutting off a limb that’s causing pain.

His breath comes out heavy by the end of it, so he loosens the stifling knot of his tie from his throat. The man fades surprisingly fast, choking on pain one second and gone the other.

 _You hit an artery,_ a voice cuts in. It’s not his. 

It’s so easy to imagine a file like that coming across his desk. A murder victim, cause of death: multiple stab wounds. A crime of passion, likely. 

There’s only embers left now, stifled with blood. It cools too quickly, coagulating into regret.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. 

His skin is crawling. It’s only when he absently scratches at it does he realize his hands are shaking even worse. It’s hard to think, so he shivers through it until skin tears and the pain doesn’t register.

When did he get to the floor?

His head is screaming at him. He tucks it between his legs, bracing for impact and squeezing his eyes shut to block out the pinpricks in his vision. The world is turning to static, white silence piercing his eardrums and flooding his sight.

It should be the same as the others, but it’s not. It _hurts._

A memory comes to him against his will, a wretched woman and her distortion. So invested in her research, so single-minded in her purpose, that she neglected the world. Maybe under different circumstances he would take it as a cautionary tale, but all he can do in this life is respect it.

Wakaba Isshiki’s palace was truly magnificent, just as inventive and labyrinthine as the person who birthed it. He was in awe. Could something this marvelous be wrong? It took him months to disassemble it, narrowly dodging traps and searching for solutions before the shadows took his head off. The puzzles were, Goro accedes, fun. It was exhilarating to take down her shadow. 

He was such an idiot. 

He should have known it would kill her.

 _It was for your justice,_ he reminded himself after, watching as the light shifted erratically along the contours of his pistol. Even heroes had to hurt others for the sake of justice. 

Putting himself down could remain for after Shido was gone.

Goro’s eyes snap open, if only to escape the recollection of his first hit. Shuddering gasps escape from his parted lips, silently screaming. There’s a haze to his thoughts, blacked-out pen marks over the things he’s done. Even now, he can’t quite fathom where he is and what is happening.

It’s a small thing that sets him off. 

His socks are wet. 

Goro’s socks are wet with blood and he just killed a man with his bare hands. There’s no buffer of cognitive dissonance that using the metaverse brings, it’s just him alone in a quiet hotel room and all of his immorality. 

The room turns clear, and suddenly he’s hyperaware of every detail. The clock blinks red on the nightstand, casting light across the wine pooling on the wood surface. The scent of copper stills in the air, so strong he doesn’t know if he will ever get it off his skin. Blood drips against the white carpet, like rivers of red carving through the snow. His brain can barely keep up with the assault on his senses.

His gaze shifts up shakily, despite knowing what awaits him. 

“What did you do?” He gasps to himself, the gravity of the situation suddenly a slamming sledgehammer. “What—did I do?”

The sight is too much—atrocious and gruesome and _awful_ . His stomach turns traitor to his actions and twists into knots. He can see his reflection twisted in the man’s glassy eyes.

 _Dead._ He’s dead. Goro can’t wrap his head around it. Impulsively, he raises his hand to stifle a cry and tastes blood. He gags, curling in on himself and coughing up saliva fitfully. Tears gather in the corners of his eyes, from disgust or shame, he doesn’t know. Salt mixes with the blood in his mouth and leaves him feeling sicker than before.

A deep voice rumbles in the cavity of his chest. “Don’t look away, child. This is your ambition.”

The sound is so revoltingly gleeful, drowning in the excitement born from violence. This line of thought is dangerous to go down, Goro knows, like pulling threads and waiting to unravel everything he's built. It’s daunting to think he wanted this, but it feels so _good_ to cast away the world and revel in his own selfishness. The fury runs down his spine in aching energy. He stopped someone wicked; he's alive, and he's won.

Goro knows every crime he committed, but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a body Goro needs to dispose of. He murdered someone—does it even matter if they deserved it or not?

His eyes are glued to the scene, like watching a car crash in slow motion. The man is just as disgusting as he was when he was alive, even more so with viscera popping out from the gaps where his skin should be.

He did this.

_‘I am thou.’_

Thoughts and action and word and impulse run along his skin and whisper in his bones, dipping under and over and crisscrossing until he can no longer tell where it stops and he starts. It stains black and white, running like ink through his veins, marring his heart with blackened fingers. Goro wishes it didn’t feel so right. 

It calms his nerves, but only just so. He takes in a steadying breath that comes out as more of a gasp and forces himself upright, nearly falling back down from dizziness. There’s a clammy sheen building on his face, but he can’t wipe it away without making more of a mess. 

Minutes stretch into hours as Goro paces, trying to sift out a plan through the fragments of his thoughts. What is he supposed to do with the corpse? Dismember it, like on some stupid police procedural? He doesn’t know if he can stomach it. 

The only thing that keeps Goro from turning tail and running out the door is his intimate knowledge of the justice system. He’s just not weak enough to abandon his goals. There’s still a plan to be executed, consequences be damned.

He stops, realizing he’s been tracking blood everywhere.

_Idiot._

The bathroom is surprisingly spotless, all shiny porcelain and immaculately clear glass. He feels bad about sullying the room by dragging the body into the shower, leaving what little blood the corpse has left swirl down the drain.

Even after Goro’s jacket is peeled off and his gloves are tossed next to the body, there are still stains on his clothes and skin. The gore is driving him insane and there’s still one option he doesn’t want to consider, so he distracts himself by running the faucet on its hottest setting and scrubbing the filth from under his nails. Unsullied, unmarked. Like it never even happened.

Blood springs up again, so he scrubs harder. It’s the only option, after all.

 _Oh._ The blood is his.

He watches it build on the tip of his finger, entranced by pearls of cherry floating to the surface of his raw skin and bursting. It turns a thin orange once it hits the water, sending cloudy ripples through the water in the basin. Another part of him, falling off like decay. _What's even left at this point?_

His phone goes off. It makes him jump, overactive nerves tensing almost painfully. He knows who’s calling before it makes it out of his pocket. He hesitates, fingers wrapped tightly around his phone. It’s five rings before Goro answers, staring at the caller ID with apprehension.

“Pick up faster next time,” Shido says, irritated. Goro stays silent.

He doesn’t want to ask Shido for help. 

He doesn’t want to grovel. 

He wants him powerless at his feet. He wants to crush him. He wants,

“Hello?”

Destruction.

It strikes him as idiotic to be this terrified, like a child awaiting punishment. He thought he grew out of that fear and optimism that grew from innocence. Goro is so much more than Shido, so much more than his blood.

_(Right?)_

“I killed him,” he says, feeling a bizarre sense of calm wash over him. “I killed him. Bring someone to clean up the body.”

He ends the call before Shido can get a word in, submerged in spiteful contentment over the control he holds over his bastard father. Goro will make him answer his demands. The feeling of being needed is more addicting than any vice a God could come up with. 

He laughs aloud at the foolishness of it all. Why was he worried about Shido, or the corpse, or anything? What did the life of that scum matter? 

_(What did his matter?)_

The world should be thanking him, revering him for taking on this role of executor. He’s unloved, so he’ll just have to _make_ them need him. If there’s no place for someone like him, he’ll carve one out of bone. 

Goro wasn’t ever meant to survive, but he has a purpose.

He feels free.

_(Psychotic.)_

The expression he catches in the mirror, blood splatter painted across his face.

It's divine. This was him.

_“Come, Loki.”_

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> mama, just killed a man
> 
> "what is carrion to the crow?"
> 
> [my tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/jkerblood) come interact i am b e g g i n g


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